A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (19 page)

“You could be here.”

I paused. “What?”

“I wish you were here.”

I was startled. He wanted me there. This wasn’t us. This wasn’t what we did. We loved each other, we were loyal, and we were both completely committed to our marriage, but this “I need you,” this “I can’t do it without you”—that wasn’t us.

“Are you asking me to come to Houston?”

“I don’t know … I’m too tired to know what I’m asking.”

“But you want me to come?”

“Stop trying to pin me down on this.” He was suddenly defensive. “I just said that I wished you were here. What’s the big deal about that? Of course I wish we were all together.”

Now he was turning this into the meaningless “wish you were here” of a postcard. But he had meant it. For whatever reason, he wanted me there. I got up and walked toward the calendar. “I could probably get down for a couple of days; the kids could stay with—” I looked at the calendar. “Oh, crap.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s no big deal. I don’t even know why I mentioned it.”

“I’ll try to work it out, Jamie, I will try.”

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter.

The problem was that starting Wednesday of this coming week, the lower- and middle-school kids were taking a series of standardized tests, the ERBs. I have no idea what the initials stand for, but the school takes them very seriously. Not only are the results used to evaluate the individual child, but also the teachers and the curriculum. At any other time I could have asked Mimi, Annelise, or Blair to take the kids, but during the standardized tests, every kid needed to be home in his or her own bed, getting a good night’s sleep.

There were two nice widows in the neighborhood who came into people’s homes for overnight baby-sitting. Although I had never used either of them, I knew plenty of people who had. A quick e-mail produced their phone numbers, but it turned out that both of them had been booked for months. Two families, in which the mom and the dad each traveled a lot in their jobs, had put these women on retainer for the duration of the ERBs just in case both parents were called away.

Whom could I call? Jamie’s mother was still recovering from her broken sternum. My brother was in California, and both he and his wife worked full-time. In a life-or-death emergency, of course, my sister-in-law would throw herself on a plane to help me, but this was not life-or-death. Jamie’s younger brother was, he always claimed, terrified of children, and I knew that he had deliberately trained himself to be incapable of putting a meal on the table to ensure that no one would ever expect him to do so. Jamie’s older brother and his wife had young children of their own at home and were busy helping Jamie’s parents.

Reluctantly I picked up the phone and called the person whom I wished I could have called first—my mother. “Is there any chance you could come out and stay with the kids this coming week?”

“I always told you and your brother that I wasn’t going to be at your beck and call for baby-sitting.”

I lived on the East Coast; Frank lived on the West. We were hardly in the habit of asking her to sit with the kids while we ran out to a movie.

“Mother, don’t you think you should have first asked me why I needed you?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. I closed my eyes, knowing that I had made a mistake. That had been the worst thing I could have said. Of course, she should have asked—she knew that—but there was absolutely no way that she was ever going to admit that she was wrong.

Her voice was tight. “I would assume that if it had been a life-threatening situation, you would have said that immediately.”

I was not up for a long conversation about whether she had been right. Such a conversation would probably end up with her agreeing to come, but it just didn’t seem worth it. And did I really want her with her critical eye and prima-donna airs running my house and taking care of my kids? “Fine, Mother, fine.”

“Now don’t take that tone with me, missy.”

“I won’t.” I was hanging up; there wouldn’t be any tone. “Good-bye.”

I took the phone back into the kitchen, swamped with weary failure. Was I letting my difficulties with my mother get in the way of being with Jamie?

Before I could replace the phone in its cradle, it rang again. It was Blair. “Oh, Lydia, I’m so glad you’re off the phone. Can you come over and help? This is such a mess.”

Her voice was frustrated, not panicked. “What is it?”

“I’ve got those stupid Styrofoam peanuts all over my yard, the street, my neighbor’s yard, and it’s getting worse by the minute.”

I really wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I said I would come. Since Erin wasn’t home, I had to bundle Thomas into the car and take him with me. When I turned down Blair’s street, I could see that Mimi’s van was already parked at the curb.

What had happened was a mishap, the results of which were so time-consuming that it didn’t feel like a mishap but a crisis.

Blair’s husband had put out at the curb for Monday’s trash collection two shipping cartons full of white foam packing pellets and had then gone off to a Wizards game, neglecting to tape the boxes shut. Blair’s neighbor had called her angrily to report that wind had knocked the cartons over and the peanuts were being blown everywhere. She had to come clean them up right now, or he would take steps.

Blair didn’t believe him about the taking steps, but she acknowledged that the pellets were her moral responsibility—or at least her husband’s—and the sooner they were cleaned up, the easier the job would be.

Blair’s yard was beautiful even at the ragged end of winter. The holly and the boxwood were glossy and green all year-round. The oak-leaf hydrangea, even when stripped of its leaves and lush flowers, had a silvery-flecked bark, and the weeping cherry trees were elegant even without their clouds of pink blossoms.

But gleaming in the fading winter sunlight, scurrying along in the wind, were thousands and thousands of those awful foam pellets. Blair and Annelise were trying to corral them with leaf blowers. Mimi was scooping them up into a trash bag that her son, Gideon, was holding, and Blair and Annelise’s younger girls were sweeping the street.

I started raking the pellets out from under the neighbor’s bushes. I found packing peanuts annoying in the best of situations; this was the worst. The air was dry. Charged with static electricity, the pellets clung to my gloves and the sleeves of my coat.

It wasn’t possible to talk over the sound of the leaf blowers so I worked silently, and the absurdity of the task suited my mood. Even after the others finished with the leaf blowers and had come nearer to me to fill the trash bags, I said nothing.

Eventually we were close enough to being done that Blair sent the kids inside. I was tying up one of the bags when Annelise put her hand on my arm. “Lydia, you don’t seem yourself. Is something wrong? I really do think things are better with the girls. None of them wanted to call Faith this afternoon. They’re all ready to have things be the way they have always been.”

I supposed I was glad of that, but right now Jamie’s misery was what mattered. I told my friends about him asking me to go to Houston, but with the ERBs I didn’t see how I could go. “And don’t even think of offering to take my kids, Annelise. You know it isn’t fair to yours.”

She sighed. “I suppose you asked your mother.”

They knew about my relationship with my mother. “I did, and I am not supposed to take that tone with her. I can’t remember if I was addressed as ‘young lady’ or ‘missy,’ but the conversation was short.”

“That’s such a shame,” Annelise said.

“I sometimes think,” Mimi said, “that’s why you are the best of us. Your mother was the worst and so you need to spend all your time being better than her. My mom is great, and—”

“Wait a second,” Blair interrupted. “Mimi, is there any chance that your mother could come and stay with Lydia’s kids?”

“Bubbe?” I exclaimed. “Come here?” Mimi’s mother lived in New York. Why should she drive five hours to come take care of my kids?

But Mimi was already snapping her fingers to get Blair’s cell phone from her. She moved off to call.

Bubbe was no picture-book grandmother. She was forthright, and she didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. She believed in right and wrong, but she never expected that anyone would find it easy to do what was right. A former pediatric nurse, she treated children as individuals. She believed that one five-year-old was as different from the next five-year-old as one adult from another. My kids adored her, and so did I.

Would I mind turning my kitchen and my children over to her? Of course not.

Blair tapped at my jaw, closing it. “It is a perfect solution. Your kids certainly know her a lot better than they know those other women you would have hired.”

“But this is way too much to ask of her,” I protested.

“But you’re really asking Mimi,” Annelise said. “You’re the one who said that we’re here to back up our kids’ throws. We want the girls to think that they can catch a ball themselves, but if they can’t, we want to be standing behind them. Mimi wants to help you, but she can’t. So her mother is going to do it for her. Isn’t that the kind of relationship you want with Erin when she grows up?”

“Yes.” Outside the Barnes & Noble store two weeks ago, I had thought about how exhilarating it was to feel that you’ve helped other people’s kids, how much self-congratulatory joy you felt for living that kind of life. And why would that stop just because you didn’t have schoolchildren in your home anymore?

Mimi was coming back toward us, sliding the antenna into the phone. “She’ll pack tonight and then leave first thing in the morning. She’ll be here long before the kids get home from school.”

It all fell into place
quickly. Mimi made my travel arrangements, and Blair and Annelise came over to help me get organized. Erin and Thomas were surprised at the notion that their friends’ grandmother was coming to stay with them, but after a moment they both declared that it was okay.

Although she didn’t say, I was pretty sure what the issue was for Erin.
What if I get my period for the first time and Mom is out of town?
After a moment’s secret thought, she probably concluded that, if nothing else, Bubbe would have at least seen the video about menstruation and so would know enough to be able to help out.

I didn’t have to guess why Thomas was agreeable about Bubbe’s coming. He told me. It was fine that she was going to be staying with the two of them, he said. Her scrambled eggs were better than mine.

I dropped the kids off
at school the next morning and went in to tell their teachers what was happening. At the offices I added Bubbe’s name to the list of people who could pick them up in an emergency. As I was heading back to my car, I saw Chris Goddard.

“You are looking very professional today,” he said.

I was in one of my formerly-a-lawyer pantsuits, and I had blown my hair dry instead of letting it do its usual “finding itself” thing. “I’m going to Houston to spend some time with my husband. Mimi Gold’s mother is staying with the children.”

“You’ll be at the trial?” he said. “That’s exciting.”

“I don’t know that I will actually go to the trial. I’d be taking someone else’s seat if I did.” I didn’t like the idea of being the wife who sweeps in and grabs a perk from a hard-working young associate.

“So you’re going to give your husband support?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure it will make a big difference to him.”

“Let’s hope,” I answered pleasantly.

I hadn’t meant anything by that. It was just something to say. But I suddenly realized while I might be hoping to “support” my husband, I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea what I was going to do, what he needed me to do. If Jamie needed legal help, I would have dusted off as many of my brain cells as I could find and pitched right in. If he needed someone to make nice dinners for him, I would have been there with pot roast, zucchini, and quarts of heavy cream. And if he needed someone to set up car pools, that was my specialty.

But he had a staff of lawyers and paralegals. The hotel was feeding him dinner, a caterer sent lunch to the courthouse, and a car service picked him up at the hotel in the morning and fetched him from the courthouse in the afternoon.

Jamie didn’t need a mom, and unfortunately, at the moment, that’s what I was best at.

Chris and I had started to walk, and I could feel my shoulders and torso start to turn toward him. I wanted to confide in him, wanted to tell him that I had no idea why I was going to Houston or what I was going to do once I was there.

But I couldn’t do that. There was a line between us that he didn’t want to cross any more than I did.

And what possible advice would he have for me? What experience had he had with the ups and downs of a marriage? He had been the road manager of a rock band, and the mother of his son had probably been a groupie.

I left my car at
home and took a cab to the airport. It wasn’t easy to get to Houston. There was only one nonstop flight a day, and it took off from Dulles and landed at Bush Intercontinental. Both these airports were long drives from the center of town. By changing in Charlotte, I could fly out of Reagan National and into Hobby. That’s what Jamie usually did.

Would my friends know how to “support” their husbands? I think so. Bruce would have called Blair because he had lost, forgotten, and/or broken everything in his life, and Blair would go find, remember, and/or fix all of it. If the ever-critical Joel called Annelise for support, he would have a list of all the things that she should have known to do yesterday even though he himself had not known that they had needed to be done. Mimi would have expected Ben to be straightforward. If he had started to backpedal in the way that Jamie had, she woud have taken him at his word that he had changed his mind.

And I didn’t think that their marriages were any better than mine, and judged by objective standards about equal partnerships, Annelise’s and Blair’s were probably worse.